doubleneck madness
I just posted a soundclip to my soundcloud page called triple doubleneck. It was recorded with my 1975 Alembic Series I doubleneck, which I acquired in 2006. This is a very historic instrument - I have heard from someone with the company that it was the first doubleneck that was ever built, even earlier than the near-mythical "John Judge" doubleneck.
The doubleneck has - you guessed it - two necks: a six-string bass on top, and fretless four-string on the bottom. As far as I have been able to figure out, the six-string used to be tuned like a Fender Bass VI - in other words, like a guitar, but an octave lower. Another way to put it is that the bottom four strings are the same as a regular bass guitar (EADG) with high B & E strings. At some point, a previous owner had it restrung more as a baritone, A-A, so in between a bass and a guitar. The six-string neck is 30" scale, like a short scale bass. I keep meaning to have Alembic re-work the guitar back to regular Bass VI tuning - I can't really come to grips with the A-A tuning.
The fretless neck is 34" scale, so regular long scale. The fretboard is blank, but it has markers on the edge of the fretboard at each fret. One interesting feature of this bass are the "bird" tailpieces - definitely not standard issue! I wonder if it might be the first "pistol grip" upper horn...
The reason the track is called "triple doubleneck" is because when I first recorded it, I posted it in two sections - I called the first "single doubleneck" since it was just the fretless by itself, then called part two "double doubleneck" - when I put it all together, the answer of what to call it seemed obvious!
In making this post, I remembered that I posted about it several years ago (before this journal became exclusively about music) - click here for more details and pictures!